Interesting reads

So right now I am reading about 10 books, ridiculous, i know!! most of them are for class, and i tend to get bored quickly so I go back and forth. Also, dumbly I am reading two other books, well sorta, and one more too. But anywayyyyyyyyyyyy the school books. I learned that video games, and television are not as horrific as I thought, and now, I am reading a book on the importance of cultural literacy. the dude makes the argument that we have to have some common knowledge in order to have social justice, a true democracy and in order to communicate well. now, clearly, i am all for justice and democracy, i am after all, a democrat and my purpose in life is to work with others for justice for all. well anyway there is this lonng list of 5000 things that literate people know. well apparently, I am not literate. but neither is anyone in my class, and it is a grad class, so clearly not all people know all those things. i want to know who made up that list. and why don't i know those things. some i know i was taught but i forget, others i never even heard of, i'll give some examples later. I learned that whilst our IQ's were going up, our SAT scores were falling, which means we are better problem solvers, but have smaller vocabularies. Hmmmm conundrum?? I don't know. I definately agree with Hirsch, we need better cultural literacy in order to be able to vote, read the newspaper, and understand what the media is telling us, and be smart enough to see past any potential bias. We need to understand our culture, and others and we need to be able to read other people's emotions, and perceive their background knowledge, but still, some of the stuff on the list is ridiculous, bunches of it we can just look up, but a lot of it is important and justified, so I am going to look stuff up, see what it is, and see if I can communicate more clearly with others. weeeeeeeelllllll see.